Breast cancer survival, vitamin supplements link found, study says

DELTHIA RICKS

9:42 AM, Oct 20, 2013

Women diagnosed with invasive breast cancer were less likely to die of the disease if they regularly consumed a vitamin and mineral tablet, compared with women who didn't take supplements, scientists have found in one of the largest studies of its kind.

Questions regarding vitamin use have pervaded scientific research for decades: Do supplements protect health? Do they impart only minuscule effects? Can they cause harm?

Dr. Sylvia Wassertheil-Smoller and colleagues at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx analyzed a colossal amount of statistical data to unearth their answer.

Dr. Janice Lu, director of medical oncology at Stony Brook University Hospital, who specializes in breast cancer, said the findings are intriguing because they echo results involving vitamin D research.

"This is very similar to a report on vitamin D, which was found to lower the risk of (a breast cancer) recurrence," Lu said. "We always tell our patients to maintain their vitamin D level and when it's low, we tell them they have to bring it up."

Yet, even in the face of an apparent protective effect, no one fully understands how vitamin D guards against recurrence, Lu said.

Similar unknowns pervade Wassertheil-Smoller's study, which is published in the current issue of Breast Cancer Research and Treatment. Her analysis was not a clinical trial, but an epidemiologic investigation. Clinical results are needed to qualify as proof. Further, there was no specific vitamin formulation that women took.

Last year, older men who received vitamins in a large study -- a clinical trial -- experienced an 8 percent lower rate of most forms of cancer. Participants took Pfizer's Centrum Silver or a look-alike placebo. Curiously, there was no reduction in prostate cancer, the most common malignancy in older men.

The new women's results also fly in the face of the Iowa Women's study, which two years ago found that older women who took a daily vitamin supplement had an increased risk of dying of cardiovascular disease and cancer.

"Our study was different," Wassertheil-Smoller said. "The Iowa study was about all cancer incidences in generally healthy women. This is about women who already have breast cancer."